Thursday, August 30, 2012

Configuration Management for Your Cloud using vCenter Operations Suite

A high level of automation is required to lower OpEx and CapEx in the cloud. Cloud infrastructures are unique as the rate of change is extremely high. Because of this rate of change how can you ensure complete visibility? How can you maintain compliance as you virtualize your Tier 1 applications?

It is possible to have a single pane of glass for your entire virtual infrastructure using vCenter Operations Suite. You can deal with compliance and introduce a high level of automation to simplify operations, provisioning and business management using these tools.

The goal of vCenter operations suite is to provide simplified operational management. In developing these products, VMware realized just integrating into the vCloud stack is not enough to add significant value.

vCenter Configuration Manager allows you to track changes, and compliance for all levels of the private cloud stack. The same policies can be used to manage both your private and public cloud. In addition as a service provider you can generate reports to your customers to demonstrate compliance.

1000's of settings and configurations are collected for all things including Virtual Network and Storage settings, Host profiles, vShield, vCD configurations and all the underlying vSphere components. Dashboards are used to present the information visually.

A Change Management Dashboard keeps track of all changes in the environment. You can also do bulk changes across all vCenters and ESXi servers at once. Once you have made changes you should configure a policy to enforce this configuration. This ensures that you tell whether or not your current configuration is revised so that it deviates from the policy.

The solution comes with many out of the Box templates for compliance. To build these VMware has an entire team that takes the policy and compliance standards and translates them into policy rule sets. In addition you can define exceptions and expire certain policies to ensure flexibility in how the rules are applied.

It is possible to run compliance reports and when things are out of compliance roll them back using the click of a button. The degree of automation can also assist with performance as well as configuration issues. From a single view you can see performance degradations. You can also see what changes where made leading up the the performance problems. Using configuration manager you can role back any changes that may have led to performance issues as well.

There is a rich set of extensibility features that are provided: APIs, workflows and SDKs. In addition the product ties into vCenter Orchestrator.




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